6 Common Small Business Digital Marketing Mistakes

Digital marketing can be a confusing world to navigate. With so many channels and strategies, it can be hard to choose the best ones for your small business.

That’s probably why so many small businesses make the same digital marketing mistakes time and time again. In making these common errors, companies everywhere are missing out on clients and profits, as well as often wasting money in unsuccessful advertising campaigns. Ensure your next long- and short-term business strategies don’t include the following online marketing mistakes!

Digital Marketing Mistakes for Your Small Business to Avoid

1. Not Writing a Blog

We’ve talked about the importance of a small business blog in the past. Maintaining a blog on your website is a crucial way of engaging your clients and potential clients and showing that you keep an active website.

Blogs also contribute to your organic SEO ranking because search engines see that your website is kept up to date. Your SEO is increased even further when other blogs or websites link to or mention your posts. By forgoing a blog, small businesses are ignoring an opportunity to keep the website current and contribute to their organic SEO.

Blog posts are also great to include on social media to engage your followers. Which leads us to the next point…

2. Misusing Social Media

Having active social media management is absolutely necessary for small business digital marketing. It lends credibility to your brand, allows clients to interact with you, and gives you a platform for communicating about your business.

Many small businesses make the mistake of biting off more than they can chew with social media. It’s important to choose the right social media channels to target your audience – don’t just start trying to post on all that are available. Social media requires regular maintenance and posts for the greatest impact. If you try and tackle too much at once, it can be overwhelming for you and underwhelming for your followers.

Research which social media channels are right for you. This will make your posts more effective and make the most out of your social media marketing budget.

3. Unfocused Writing

Web writing is completely different than many other types of writing. While poetic, flowery writing may be great for university essays, it is not as effective for conversion on your website.

Web content creation requires research and a focus on certain keywords that your potential clients are searching for. It also requires appropriate calls-to-action so visitors to your website have something to react to. Importantly, web content must be easy to read, easy to understand, and well-organized so users can find what they’re looking for.

Many small businesses try to explain too much on their website, or use jargon and technical language. This is a common digital marketing mistake that can lead users to click off your website as soon as they click onto it.

4. Having Unclear Campaign Goals

Now we’re into the money. Digital marketing mistakes in this realm are not only detrimental to your businesses development, but also to your budget.

When creating a digital campaign on social media or search engines, it’s imperative that you know what you want to get out of these ads. Do you want to increase clicks to your website? Reach a sales goal? Better your Google ranking? Increase email list sign-ups? Each unique goal requires a different campaign strategy. Many small businesses will just experiment blindly with keywords and then struggle to understand results. This can lead to a lot of wasted money!

Make sure to decide what you want to achieve before you begin a campaign. That way, you can better understand your results and how to improve.

5. Targeting the Wrong Audience

Closely related to campaign goals is the digital marketing mistake of targeting the wrong audience. As a small business that offers a product or service, you need to be familiar with who you are trying to sell to before you begin digital marketing.

Knowing your audience will help you target the right campaigns at the right time. You’ll be able to tailor your blog posts, updates, and advertisements to the right people. You don’t just have to stop at age, gender, job, or location. Make use of software that tracks how people utilise your website and other behaviours. Ignoring your audience is a common mistake that leads to lost opportunities and wasted money.

6. Ignoring Results Analyses

There is so much software designed to track the success of various digital marketing campaigns, audiences, blog posts, social media, and calls-to-action. Unfortunately, it’s common for many small businesses to ignore these tools and not pay attention to an analysis of digital marketing results.

Many people just put out the information and campaigns and forget about it. However, to get the most out of your budget and effort, you need to track and analyze the results to see what works and what doesn’t. This way, you can easily and quickly adjust campaigns and strategies and stick to what works.

Contact Us

VivosWeb provides services for updating blogs, social media management, web content writing, SEO and PPC campaigns, and analysis reporting. We can use our experience to make your small business digital marketing a success!

VivosWeb is a full service digital marketing agency located in the heart of Hamilton, ON. Our professional marketing team has significant experience developing websites for all markets and at a variety of price points.